23rd August 2006 Autoexpress feature

No hosepipes for the £5k cleaner!

Car wash businesses are exempt from the hosepipe ban. However, if you get Paul Dalton to do the job, the cost could be a lot more than the £1,000 fine you would get for breaking the law. That's because his firm, Miracle Detail, offers the most expensive car wash in the world. Its 61-stage Pinnacle service is a wallet-busting £4,800 - that's more than the price of a new Perodua Kelisa!

Car wash businesses are exempt from the hosepipe ban. However, if you get Paul Dalton to do the job, the cost could be a lot more than the £1,000 fine you would get for breaking the law. That's because his firm, Miracle Detail, offers the most expensive car wash in the world. Its 61-stage Pinnacle service is a wallet-busting £4,800 - that's more than the price of a new Perodua Kelisa!

To find out exactly what you get for your money, we met up with Dalton at Modena Cars in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, where he was busy 'cleaning' a well known celebrity's Lamborghini Murcielago. "I don't valet cars," Dalton quickly pointed out. "What I do is called detailing, which is the systematic rejuvenation of a vehicle's individual surfaces." Translated, this essentially means he can make a motor look better that if it's just rolled off the production live.

Dalton added: "Even some brand now Lamborghinis are not finished perfectly in the factory. They may have a few blemishes, but I can get rid of these and create and amazing shine." So how does he make a £175,000 orange Murcielago sparkle even brighter? Well, as he explained, there are three main phases to the Pinnacle process.

Purified
The first is washing, which is done with purified water, a rare organic shampoo and super-soft natural sea sponge. The bodywork is then dried using various hi-tech cloths of varying grades, before contaminants are removed with special clay which looks a bit like Plasticine. All this is a full day's work for Dalton.

The next phase is paintwork correction, which can take a week. He explained: "Most polishes are very aggressive, and while they can remove scratches fast, they effectively replace these with a lot of smaller ones which show up as swirls in direct sunlight. I use a gentle polish in order to get the paint to reflect light like a mirror. The only drawback is that it is very labour-intensive to apply."

The finale of the world's most expensive car wash is four coats of ***** ****** wax, which is applied by hand over a 96-hour period.

Care has to be taken not to waste any; at £6,275 per tub, it's more expensive per gram than gold. But for those who can't afford such extravagance, there's always Miracle Detail's entry-level wash, the Classic. It costs a mere £295!